Root Chromecast The Easy Way With FlashCast

As is always the case with such things, and especially anything involving streaming video or music, Google’s Chromecast dongle immediately attracted the attention of modders and developers alike. If there’s anything that gets the geek juices flowing it’s going to be a mini dongle with a bit if computing power. Sure enough, Chromecast was hacked, but in a good way which we users always like.

Unfortunately for us, Google patched the excite boot vulnerability that was being used to root Chromecast, but if you happen to have a device with the original software in place, then actually making the rooting magic happen should now be a little bit easier thanks to one XDA-Developer forum goer.

FlashCast, developed by tchebb, is a USB flash image that aims to streamline the Chromecast flashing process, making the whole thing a little less irksome.

As the developer himself puts it;

FlashCast is a USB image that provides a standardized way to mod your Chromecast. Think of it like a recovery which runs off of a USB drive. No more struggling with the limitations of the GTVHacker image, which is hard to modify and can only flash the /system partition. FlashCast is based on shell scripts, so it you can use it to do anything you can do with a root shell. It also comes with a comprehensive suite of helper functions, so many tasks actually become much easier than they would be using a regular shell.

In order to use FlashCast, you’ll need a USB stick with at least 128MB of storage and a powered micro USB OTG cable. The latest version of FlashCast might come in useful, too.

You can head on over to the FlashCast thread to get started, and remember that this will only work on the original shipping Chromecast firmware. Of you’re running an origin Chromecast then it’s almost begging to be flashed.

Go on, you know you want to. In fact, we want to, so it might be time we got ourselves one of those fancy new Chromecasts too.

All set for rooting that Chromecast dongle? Then simply head over to the XDA-Developers forum thread below and get started. The process is easy if you have the right tools and skills.